Iran conflict reveals flaws in China’s war machine

China has transformed the People’s Liberation Army into a high-tech fighting force on land, sea, and air during the past decade. Well, that is the propaganda puff from Beijing, but does it stack up with reality?

Questions are certainly being asked about the quality, not the quantity, of the weapons of destruction in the PLA arsenal, generated by the country’s massive industrial complex. Are they really the products of advanced technology or cheap imitations?

Reports have surfaced about the “performance” of Iran’s “air defense network,” such as the Chinese-made HQ-9B surface-to-air system. Concerns came after Tehran’s hard-line leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his inner circle were killed in missile strikes last weekend.

The ongoing military operation by Israel and the United States has “raised serious” doubts. In January, American surgical strikes to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro appeared to illustrate flaws in the Chinese-supplied missile defense web in Caracas.

“This is a humiliating display of technological impotence,” according to academic and writer Youlun Nie, a former professor at East China Normal University and a regular contributor to The Jamestown Foundation’s China Brief.

“The combined failure of [Chinese] hardware on the global stage and the sweeping corruption scandals at home threaten to inflict a fatal collapse of China’s aspirations as a leading global arms supplier,” he wrote in The Diplomat this week.

The People’s Liberation Army is currently paralyzed.

Youlun Nie, academic and writer

Conflict in the Gulf

• For the Communist Party state, this is a regional disaster for a close ally as the political event of the year, the National People’s Congress, gets underway in Beijing.
• Top of the agenda will be annual growth targets and the new five-year economic blueprint, which will be rubber-stamped by 3,000 NPC delegates.

Delve deeper: But missing from the Party’s big bash will be vast swathes of top brass from China’s armed forces. The forever purge of the military has gathered pace in the past three years amid corruption charges.

Between the lines: “The People’s Liberation Army is currently paralyzed. As Beijing launches draconian inventory inspections to root out widespread quality defects, global buyers are questioning the quality and efficacy of Chinese arms,” Youlun Nie said.

Big picture: Michael Sobolik, of the Hudson Institute think tank based in Washington, underlined the challenges facing President Xi Jinping’s administration.

Bottom line: “Any nation around the world with Chinese defense equipment is checking defenses and wondering how safe they actually are,” he told the Reuters news agency.

China Factor comment: As the Iran conflict drags on, this has been a “catastrophic geo-economic earthquake” for the world’s second-largest economy. In short, it has destroyed China’s “entire Middle Eastern architecture.”